


guilt is a woman and she's walking on her knees

by lonelyghosts



Category: Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Bisexual Katniss Everdeen Is Canon And I'll Fight You On It, Canonical Character Death, F/F, Grief/Mourning, Minor Katniss Everdeen/Peeta Mellark
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-19
Updated: 2019-06-19
Packaged: 2020-05-07 04:40:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,443
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19202080
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lonelyghosts/pseuds/lonelyghosts
Summary: Grief is woman too but all she does is sleep.





	guilt is a woman and she's walking on her knees

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tactfulGnostalgic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tactfulGnostalgic/gifts).



> hey roxilalonde, i know you like hunger games femslash and madge/katniss is honestly my F a v o r i t e rarepair, and i thought you'd like it so here you go
> 
> this is also for my gf anika! i love you sweetheart!

When they told her about Madge- about the firebombing of District Twelve, how only Gale's quick actions created survivors out of what would have been ash and rubble, how the mayor died alone with his family in their pretty white house on the hill because the Capitol does not know mercy- Katniss did not cry, simply nodded, asked to be excused. 

They looked at one another with shared pity and said, "Yes, of course," and Katniss went to the small apartment that is all she has left of home and sat on the bed, hands fisted in the sheets and thought,  _is there nothing that they will not take from me_?

All her life had been owned by the Capitol. Even before the Games she lived only at their mercy, because they didn't care enough about the people of Twelve to bother with subjugation. She lived off venison and rabbit meat and the knowledge that if they wanted to they could have her whipped to death and no one would have stopped them because back then she was a teenage girl whose only concern was feeding her family, and who would have wanted to risk their neck for that?

Her mother would have sobbed and screamed and broken and Prim would be hollow-eyed and cheeked because Gale can't feed seven mouths alone and pity only goes so far. It was by the grace of Peacekeepers who couldn't be bothered to care and a mayor whose daughter loved strawberries that they survived, but she has never been unaware of that.

Even before the Games she was owned.

Then they sent her in and she belonged to them, all of her. Gale, too, turned into a distant cousin, their long trust built by years of shared food and knowledge turned into the off-hand word  _family_. Her little sister, her mother, her every move was public property.

When she kissed Peeta for the first time she had not known whether it was for her or the cameras, and they never gave her enough time to find out. She wanted to find out if it was Peeta- the soft breadsmell of him that lingered after weeks in the arena, the way he sighed into her mouth like he'd been waiting so long for something he'd never entirely been able to bring himself to hope for, the way he looked at her after, eyes heavy-lidded from exhaustion and sickness but still awed by her. Nights in the dark when the oppressive gaze of the cameras fell off her shoulders, she would look at him and think I could love this boy in the way they want me to. 

Or maybe it was just the way it felt, the intimacy of it all, the raw animal need that stirred in her gut and made her want more. It could have been the way she'd never felt this close to anyone except maybe tucking Prim into bed at nights sometimes when she was feeling particularly sentimental, but that was a different kind of closeness, one that ached in softly the throat and not hard and unforgivingly in the stomach. 

Other girls, whose lives were not owned by an fawning white citadel ruled by a man with blood in his mouth and the smell of rose cologne, they would have had the opportunity to learn, to explore themselves and the boys they loved, and the girls, too, even if that had to be stolen for them too. They had every moment to find out. But not her.

She had thought going home would help, but it didn't. Gale kissed her in the woods and said  _Just this once, Catnip_ , and it had not been the same. His lips were soft and his hands were kind but mostly she felt deep pity and an overwhelming urge to walk away, because she loved him but the kiss was awkward and sad and hopeless and she didn't know how to love him in any way but the old way: backs together, watching out for each other, bows hidden in hollow logs and shared game. She didn't even get to think about it, to figure it out the way other girls might have, before President Snow whispered the secret of a stolen moment rose-sickly in her ear.

Falling in love with Peeta was not hers, anymore, even if she had wanted it to be. It was a romance for the ages, it was the greatest love story ever told, it was something to make stylists and Capitol freaks swoon over, and none of it was hers. All of the things that might have meant something, that should have meant something, that would have in any other world- the bond between two people who kept saving each other because they didn't know how to not, even before they'd really known each other. The bond between the two of them that said  _you and I, we're real people and you make me believe in the idea of a future_ , the way they slipped into each others' beds at night and held each other. Shared trauma, and the way she put herself in front of him by instinct, and the way he treated her like she was something beyond beauty. 

All of it reduced to ash and plastic and cameras rolling. His fingers in her own, which would have meant  _you are here with me_ once, and all she could think about was  _is this good enough is this enough for them?_

She stole moments with Madge like candy in the kitchen, soft and sweet and illicit. And it had been hers, the only thing belonging to her ina world where she owned only her thoughts, and even those were becoming public property. President Snow hadn't thought to question the friendship of two girls who had every reason to hate each other but didn't. 

They kissed in her bedroom and Madge tasted like strawberries and the only thing that Katniss could count on. Her hair was getting longer and Madge sighed, said she wanted nothing more than to chop it all off and Katniss said, You'd look pretty handsome like that and Madge had blushed and so had she, because this flirting was hers, was her own mouth saying it and not a set of lines behind cameras, was anything but scripted. She fumbled over her words and so did Madge and it was good, it was theirs, it belonged to the two of them.

They had been friends, before. Strawberries, and squirrels, and class projects at school and the way Madge looked at Katniss like she hung the moon sometimes, hung off her every lyric in music class; the way Katniss had been there for the two months in ninth grade that Madge stopped smiling, without any idea of what help meant except that she wouldn't treat Madge like something broken, because anything could be mended if you had nimble enough fingers and enough thread. 

But this was new, Madge playing piano and Katniss following along, her fingers hesitant on the keys and asking for Madge's approval. She could have made it her talent but she didn't, because music belonged to her and this music belonged to her and Madge. They kissed on the night that the Quarter Quell was announced, Madge sneaking in through the window to Katniss's room, tears on her face, and seeing Katniss broken. Madge had held Katniss's hand and asked what she needed and Katniss said  _to forget_ and so they forgot, for the night. 

Madge didn't notice the hole ripped in her stocking till the next morning. 

Which was all to say that Madge was something that Katniss had kept secret, had kissed at night, had loved and held and been protected by. There had been parts of her that only Madge had seen and Katniss had thought of that as armor. 

That armor was ash now.

How many more things could she lose? They took Rue and Foxface and Johanna and Lavinia and Thresh and her mother and her father and Mags and Cinna and Wiress and Peeta and her home. And yet still she had the audacity to be surprised at what they could take from her.

How stupid of her to think she was anything but property; that even the moonlight of those silver nights and the sunlight of those golden days could not be bottled and sold and broken, too. Madge had been hers, and now she was ashes. Yet another thing that Katniss had failed to protect. 

Yet another thing, Katniss thought grimly, alone in the place that would never be her home, to be avenged. 

**Author's Note:**

> madge/katniss is my favorite katniss pairing but im soft for katniss/peeta because they were sweet and the idea of a young adult het romance where the boy was actively kind toward the girl was very important to me when i read the books, and the dynamic between them is just [chefs kisses fingers] utterly divine.


End file.
